Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Caroline A. Streeter WORDS OF WITNESS: BLACK WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE POST-BROWN ERA, by Angela A. Ards. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 230 pp. $26.95 paper; $26.95 ebook. BRIDGES TO MEMORY: POSTMEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHNIC AMERICAN WOMEN’S FICTION, by Maria Rice Bellamy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 190 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook. At first glance, a study of autobiographical works and an examination of literary fiction might appear to have little in common. However, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era and Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction resist polarizing classifications. Both Angela A. Ards and Maria Rice Bellamy deploy feminist theory and an intersectional methodology. Intersectionality, first articulated by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the template for comprehending subjectivity on the part of women of color, for whom identity is constituted through multiple registers of experience. In Words of Witness, Ards considers a selection of black women’s life stories to construct a chronological counternarrative to the modern civil rights movement. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy theorizes the way inflections of race and gender reconfigure the literature of postmemory. Bellamy’s reading of comparative ethnic literature captures how legacies of racism and imperialism engender repetitive cycles of traumatic memory among women of color. Ards and Bellamy incorporate textual indeterminacy in their analyses. Words of Witness addresses the increasingly ambiguous distinction between autobiography—fact-based documentation by historical actors—and the subjective recollection of memoir. Ards identifies the contested status of some works in her study. She also acknowledges potential influence on the part of publishers seeking to exploit the popularity of confessional writing. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy makes a risky move by historicizing postmemory literature in social movements: “the critical historical moments of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 147). The hazard here entails reifying ethnic fiction as a kind of sociology or exercise in identity politics. The manifestation of political tensions internal to the studies are signposts of intersectional methodology. Ultimately, Words of Witness and Bridges to Memory emphasize multivocal testimony and collective memory as critical agents of transformation. The power of the collective voice is embodied in the structural similarities that link these works, each of which consists of five chapters. Each chapter in Ards features one author and one text. In Bellamy, one among five chapters focuses on two authors [End Page 236] and texts. (Bridges to Memory also ends with a conclusion incorporating a brief discussion of a film.) The phenomenon of overlapping methodologies and concerns is accentuated by the presence of Edwidge Danticat in both books—her memoir in Ards and a short story cycle in Bellamy. Ards calls the production of countercultural memory in black women’s autobiographies “the ethics of self-fashioning” (p. 4). Countercultural memory is powered by the holistic articulation of personal narrative and political discourse. The challenge of balancing the inner life with political activism animates Words of Witness. Ards examines works published between 1994 and 2009—four memoirs and one theatrical production based on an unpublished screenplay. The texts, “in dialogue with particular [political] legacies,” adeptly demonstrate the elisions in the master narrative of the modern civil rights movement (p. 5). Warriors Don’t Cry (1994) is Melba Beals’s harrowing story of her time as one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the group of black teenagers at the center of the 1957 campaign to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock epitomized the intransigence of Jim Crow, demonstrating the unapologetic resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools. Warriors Don’t Cry is the counter history to the continual citation of Brown as the earliest signpost in the triumphant narrative of civil rights. Although Warriors Don’t Cry provides an able template...